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Identifying Change Management Strategies for Sustainability
Sara E. Smiley Smith,Environmental Studies Program Manager, Yale College
Doctoral candidate

Summary:
Efforts to improve sustainability at higher education institutions often require challenging shifts in organizational priorities, patterns of behavior, management strategies, and community expectations. In guiding these shifts, sustainability leaders must grapple with a diverse array of competing needs, requiring thoughtful approaches to change management. The change management literature itself is diverse, with numerous suggestions for improving processes. Using three distinct fields that take unique approaches to understanding change, this analysis attempts to distill lessons which can inform the challenges faced in institutional sustainability efforts.

• In the field of public health, experts grapple with complex regulatory settings, a diversity of patient or population needs, and highly complex information.
• The ecological study of climate change and efforts to manage impact reduction and mitigation, scientists work with complex systems analysis and data to draw conclusions and suggest actions.
• Finally, looking at change management through the lens of business management can provide additional insight into priority development, clear communication, and leadership.

Each of these examples provides insights that can be of great use to sustainability leaders as they attempt to identify the nuances of their systems, and manage the path forward.

Intro:
Efforts to improve sustainability often require huge shifts, with competing néeds.

Three examples:
• Public Health
• Ecology
• Business Management

Change management:
Implementing skills, processes and system needed to manage transition.

Elements:
Organizational priorities
Behavior patterns
Organizational structure

PUBLIC HEALTH:

• Complex environment
• Strict regulatory setting
• Diverse clientele
• No tolerance for error

1947 writings. Lewin
Three models
• Unfreezing system
• Moving things
• Refreezing

1954, Drucker
Management by Objectives: role of reprimand

Case study from UK
• Inform when goals not met
• If you can't measure it you can't manage it
• Reward strong performance

ECOLOGY:

Branch of biology focused on study of relationships of organisms one to another and their physical surroundings.

Theory of ecological character displacement, Brown and Wilson
• Dominant competitor displaces the other
• Competing species encourage phenotypic divergence

Lessons from an ecological perspective?
• Adaptation
• Resilience
• Natural selection

BUSINESS MANAGEMENT:

Kotter's 8 Steps: (John Kotter, Harvard)
1. Establish a sense of urgency
2. Form a powerful guiding coalition. Especially essential in terms of sustainability, which is not a hierarchical discipline.
3. Create a vision. Must be organized and sensible, we can't let it devolve into a "list of lists." We need to drive behavior.
4. Communicate the vision. Lead by example.
5. Empower others to act on the vision. Get rid of obstacles, reward nontraditional thinking, risk-taking.
6. Plan for and create short-term wins. Reward people for performance.
7. Consolidate improvements and produce still more change.
8. Institutionalize new approaches.

Jick and Mento
• T. Jick - change management as a blend of art and science
• A. Mento - 12- step model incorporates addition of measurement toward goals and cultural context

Higher Education Perspective:
Aber and Mallory, Sustainability arrives with plural meanings. Importance of culture.

Thinking across cases:
• Understanding your institution
• Focusing on interactions between systems and the factors that enable or disable successful cross-avocation and cross-communication.
• Measure, assess, communicate
• Value divergent perspectives

There isn't one clear path toward change.

Q&A:
• Urgency: balance. Avoid the "Chicken Little" syndrome.
• Ecological change: relevance. The way ecologists think about change reinforces the need to think systemically, introduce resilience in our approach to human systems. We need to involve, continue to respond to various pressures.
• Balance "bottom-up" approach with need for buy-in from the top.